Original Sin - Interview @ The Jace Hall Show

JHS: The disagreement system sounds really interesting. Can you elaborate on this for us briefly?SV: The idea is to replicate what you have in a traditional pen & paper RPG. There the concept of a party leader isnít that common and instead itís the party members as a group that decide what they are going to do. So we allow discussion in the game via the form of interactive dialogs between players. And if you donít agree with each other, the game looks at your persuasive abilities and you get to choose between for instance intimidation, reasoning or charming. Who wins is decided by your stats (e.g. persuasion+strength=intimidation) But itís also based on the particular situation. No use charming when youíre trying to figure out which route to take in a dungeon as youíre being hunted by a maniac zombie. The game also remembers the nature of your decisions as personal traits, and this in turn affects the relation between the party members.
And because we have this system to support cooperative play, we can also have an AI control one of the party members if you are playing alone. Which makes for really fun RPG gameplay. You can set the AIís personality to for instance loyal friend (the other will always do what you want) or mute (you decide on your own) or to another type of personality that doesnít necessarily agree.